I snapped a few pictures from the airplane on the way back to D.C. last weekend. The shimmering glow of the horizon caught my attention, and I grabbed the camera.
I don’t think we were quite at 30,000 feet, but I was looking at the vast expanse of only a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface. Beautiful.
I couldn’t help but laugh about the so-called land shortage. As I saw it from the air, there is no shortage of land. (That photo was taken as we got closer to D.C., but further out, the land was even greener.) The problem is government regulation of land, bureaucrats telling owners where they can and can’t build. There’s more than enough space out there for everyone, in my opinion, but different groups have different incentives to build or not to build in that space.
For instance, in my own area, lawmakers, both liberal and conservative, support what’s known as “Smart Growth.” (Also see Regional ‘Smart-Growth’ Campaign Goes Online) The big idea is that you build houses and apartments closer to public transportation, creating “mixed use” urban centers where people can work, play, and live. This will supposedly alleviate the region’s dreadful traffic congestion.
Conservative types in areas like Loudoun County, Virginia, support Smart Growth because they don’t want a bunch of people ruining the neighborhood. Right-leaning folks supporting more government control. Ironic. Back in the day, people regulated themselves in the form of restrictive covenants in deeds (to not sell to blacks, for example) of their private property. We could spend all day arguing about whether they had a right to refuse to sell to blacks, but that’s another post.
Anti-big government folks once scoffed at government regulation (civil rights laws, for example) and people in Washington telling them what they could and couldn’t do with their own property. Times have changed. Government has gotten bigger and greedier. Thanks, George Bush.
To an extent, I understand why both sets of groups — young, single urban dwellers vs. older, married suburbans and exurbans with young children — support land use restrictions. For the first group, usually liberal types, it’s a chance to do something “good,” to reduce pollution and create a “diverse” area where all kinds of people are clustered in the same area, and everything is lovely and multicultural. In socialist utopias, there is no crime.
As for the second group, part of the reason they left the cities was to raise children in safer areas with less crime and more and less expensive space. When city dwellers flock to the suburbs, the demand for housing increases, which tends to raise the costs. And part of the allure of life outside the city was fewer people, and fewer of a certain kind of people.
Let’s be honest here. We know that illegal aliens are everywhere. Their culture is different from ours, and some don’t seem interested in assimilating into American culture. And there’s the gang problem. Virginia has a gang problem! (See Gang follows illegal aliens.)
I intended to blog about Thomas Sowell’s latest column, Rich Ideas, but I went in a different direction. Toward the end, after reading this paragraph…
Of all the romantic self-indulgences of the affluent and the wealthy, few are more ridiculous than their passion to “save” farmland. This country has no shortage of farmland or of food.
…I thought about the pictures I’d taken from the plane.
When it comes to government regulation, is there really a difference between conservatives and liberals? I’m beginning to think not. It all comes down to incentives and who stands to gain the most from which regulation.
You can count on one thing in this life, if nothing else: human nature will never change.
